Trump Wanted $20 Million For 2006 Moscow Tower Deal, Oligarch Says

Trump wanted $20 million for a 2006 Trump Tower Moscow project that never materialized, his prospective business partner Russian-Ukrainian oligarch Pavel Fuchs told journalists in Kyiv this week.

“He said $20 million is nothing,” Bloomberg quoted Fuchs as saying. “I said, no, it’s a lot of money. We couldn’t agree.”

Fuchs, who says he’s banned from entering the United States, added that he counteroffered with $10 million to be paid in installments, but that Trump wanted $20 million immediately for the right to use the Trump brand.

He added to Bloomberg that the deceased Soviet-born developer Tamir Sapir introduced him to Trump in 2005. Sapir later partnered with Trump on his Trump SoHo project.

Fuchs recalled that Trump was late to a January 2006 meeting, leaving him to drink tea with a pregnant Melania Trump and her father.

“I will emphasize: this was a business contact,” Fuchs added in a separate interview about the topic to Ukrainian news website Ukrainska Pravda.

Fuchs said the last encounter he had with Trump occurred in 2009 or 2010 at a party at Mar-a-Lago.

“I walked up to him and said, ‘do you remember me?’ He said, ‘yes, of course I remember,'” Fuchs recalled.

The Ukraine-based oligarch added that Trump then introduced him to an unnamed Congressman at the party.

Fuchs had a separate cameo in Trumpworld: he tried to attend his inaugural, reportedly drawing the interest of special counsel Robert Mueller.

He was refused entry to the United States in Miami in December 2017, he said, adding that U.S. officials had questioned him about his business interests and ties to the Russian military.

Fuchs also drew attention last year after hiring Trump attorney Rudy Giuliani to work on a project involving the Ukrainian city of Kharkiv.

Josh Kovensky
is an investigative reporter for Talking Points Memo, based in New York. He previously worked for the Kyiv Post in Ukraine, covering politics, business, and corruption there.